Livingston had also studied Lapland, home of reindeer, and frequently wrote of animals and other objects in flight.
"He had no survival skills," Starr writes of this urban animal turning on his literary spit.
An essay in the book titled "Animal Surgery", in which Long wrote of various animals' ability to treat and mend their own injuries, particularly riled his critics.
In The Journey of the Stamp Animals, she writes of rediscovering a children's book that – many years earlier – had seemed so stuffed with illicit magic.
She writes of being dazzled by the animals' strength and strange beauty; she wants to commune with them, longs for them to recognize her when she visits their tanks, and lets them "taste" her skin with their chemoreceptive suckers.
When Michael Pollan writes about animals, an avalanche of mail follows.
As a teenager, he wrote stories of animal life and colonial India, and at the age of 16, with his father's help, he published a Kiplingesque tale, "Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard," which was a critical success in England and is to be published soon in the United States.
They write of their childhoods, of animal encounters, of experiences with nature.
Mr. Smith, they note, warned of the "overweening conceit" of human beings, while Mr. Keynes wrote of the influence of "animal spirits" on the economy.
Therefore, Long was not the first to write of the learned intelligence of animals.
A child wrote of losing her stuffed animal only to have it mysteriously reappear later.
